Positive Psychology Specialization Project: Design Your Life for Well-being

You are encouraged to take the first four courses of the Foundations of Positive Psychology Specialization before starting this course and completing the Specialization Project. This course, taught by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman brings all the key concepts from the first four courses to practice as you develop and test a new positive intervention for an audience of your choice. You identify opportunities in your daily life to increase the wellbeing by using knowledge you developed in the first four courses of the Specialization. In this final project, you evaluate the efficacy of a positive intervention based on subjective and objective measures. Then, you compare how empirical and non-empirically-based positive interventions can be applied to influence a person's wellbeing. Lastly, you reflect on how the fundamental elements of research methods are important in the everyday application of positive psychology. After completing all five courses, learners earn a certificate signed by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, Dr. James Pawelski, Dr. Angela Duckworth, Dr. Claire Robertson-Kraft and Dr. Karen Reivich.

• Character Strengths: One Concept to Rule them All
• Module 1 of the Positive Psychology Capstone reviews the VIA Character Strengths Classification and in particular asks the learner to identify his or her five signature strengths and assess if they are authentic.
• Peterson Theory on Psychological Mental Illness as defined as an Excess, an Absence, or an Opposite of a Character Strength rather than by the Presence or Absence of a Symptom in the DSM
• Module 2 presents Chris Peterson's unfinished theory on mental illness. Specifically his belief that the absence of strengths, the excess of strengths, and the opposite of strengths might define 72 conditions of character weakness, and that these shortcomings might be a better framework than the DSM which uses a checklist of symptoms.
• Developing a Positive Intervention using a signature strength to bolster a strength absence or strength opposite. Hypothesis & Experiment Design for Personal Positive Intervention
• Module 3 has the learner target an area for remediation from among Peterson's inventory of 72 deviant strengths and craft a positive intervention using a signature strength.
• Putting the Positive Intervention into Action
• Module 4 has the learner put the positive intervention into action, assess and the share the results, and finally reduce the positive intervention to writing so it can be shared.